More Websites Go Down Due to Hosting Suppliers: Is Your Migration Plan in Place?

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again – your website hosting service has more power over your profits than you think. It’s their job to keep your site up and running. If they don’t do their job properly, your site goes down and you lose profits. You either have a great backup plan in place or you’re at the mercy of explaining the situation to your website visitors and hoping they’ll understand and be patient.

Gay Men’s Health is one website that went down this week. The company tweeted, “Our website is down! Problem with service supplier. Please call if you need anything.” Apparently the server the website was hosted on went down and the advocate site couldn’t do anything about it but make their followers aware of the issue.

TranceFamily Lebanon also had a similar experience, tweeting “Our website is currently down due to problems in hosting servers. It will be online as soon as possible.” Another victim of a hosting provider gone bad.

What can be done about situations such as the ones above?

Taking the Bull by the Horns

The above-mentioned websites did take a step in the right direction – they notified their customers via social media platforms that their sites were indeed down and why they were down. Communication is key and customers were not left in the dark. When your site goes down, however, you need to take it a step further. Communication itself will not be enough.

First, check the website host yourself. Log into your hosting account and make sure it isn’t anything on your end. Has your site run out of space? Has it run out of memory? Is the software configured properly? If everything is working on your end and it is an issue with the server itself, get on the phone with your hosting provider and ask when they expect to have it back up and running. The common denominator in the above tweets was that neither of them provided readers with an expected uptime. If your host can’t tell you when they plan on having the site back up and running, it’s time to take matters into your own hands.

If you’re smart you’ll already have a migration strategy in place. This means you’ll be able to migrate your site to another web host for the duration of the outage (or permanently if the host you are using has been going down frequently). If you don’t yet have a migration strategy in place, you’re going to at least want a custom 505 error message in place letting your visitors know that there is an issue with your site’s server and it will be back up and running as soon as possible. If the outage is extensive, you may still want to try to migrate your site to another server during the outage even if a migration strategy has not yet been put into place.

You Can Stress about the Problem or Create a Solution

You have two choices when your website goes down. You can sit back and stress about the problem or you can try to create a solution. Sometimes creating a solution means being proactive, like putting a migration strategy into place before you run into problems. If you have yet to do so, now is the time. That way you’ll be ready if and when your site does go down. We’ll talk more about utilizing migration strategies in later posts.